Precariousness in Diasporic Puerto Rican Literature: Reading Piri Thomas, Migdalia Cruz and Guillermo Rebollo Gil

• In Event: The Precarious Side of Puerto Rican Diaspora Literature: Understanding the Politics of Inclusion/Exclusion

Abstract

Recent scholarship probes normative articulations of a Puerto Rican/Nuyorican/Boricua/Diasporican subject (e.g., Flores’s Diaspora Strikes Back, Duany’s Blurred Borders, Noel’s In Visible Movement), while scholars and politicians forcefully announce a shift in island/diaspora balance of population and cultural. We could argue, furthermore, that ontological impermanence (as well as political, cultural, and economical conditions) has been the norm for rather than the exception for Puerto Ricans. Despite the eloquence and audacity of Puerto Rican identitarian discourse and will, precariousness has ever framed the colonial condition. Taking advantage of critiques of identity/ontology by Badiou (Being and Event), Virilio (Grammar of the Multitude), and Butler (Precarious Life), my paper explores an ontological horizon that opens up to itinerancy and precariousness. From this vantage point, I will analyze how Puerto Rican/Diasporican literature situates a problematic subjective articulation in diaspora. For this purpose, I will discuss the work of Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), Cruz’s Fur (1997), and Rebollo Gil’s Fire Island (2014). These three works symbolize precariousness inscribed in Down These Mean Streets’ impetus for travel, and in its criminalized and imprisoned protagonist; in Fur’s monstrous and cannibalistic Nena; and Rebollo Gil’s island-diasporic poetics (Nuyorican ethics and genealogy, bilingualism, rejection of island networks of power).

Author

• Guillermo B Irizarry Diaz, University of Connecticut